Conversations around higher education mergers require explorations of identity, emotion, and systems. People do not respond to mergers simply because reporting lines change or departments reorganize. They respond because mergers disrupt meaning, belonging, relationships, status, and identity. What looks from the outside like resistance to change is often something much deeper: an attempt to preserve a sense of self within a shifting institutional landscape.
In earlier posts, I discussed how family systems theory can help explain why mergers evoke such strong emotional reactions across universities. In this next post, I want to build on that idea using Stryker and Burke’s Identity Theory to explore why people within the same merger can experience it in dramatically different ways — from excitement and possibility to grief, anger, withdrawal, or distrust.
When faculty hear that their college will merge with another unit, the reaction is often framed publicly as resistance to change, territoriality, or concern about budgets and governance. But those explanations rarely capture the emotional intensity that follows. Why does a structural change in an organization feel so personal?
Identity theory, particularly the work of sociologists Sheldon Stryker and Peter Burke, offers a compelling explanation: mergers threaten the social identities people use to understand who they are in the academic world.
Universities Are Identity Systems
According to Stryker’s Identity Theory, people hold multiple identities tied to the roles they occupy and the groups to which they belong. Faculty are not simply employees. They are mentors, scholars, department members, disciplinary experts, advisors, researchers, and representatives of institutional traditions. A wonderful former professor would introduce herself as a writer; the words we use to describe ourselves tend to be our salient identities.
These identities are not interchangeable labels. They are deeply connected to meaning, belonging, and social relationships. Identity theory argues that individuals seek “identity verification,” meaning they want others and institutions to recognize them in the same way they recognize themselves. When verification occurs, people experience stability and positive emotions. When identities are not verified, distress emerges. A merger can interrupt that verification process overnight.
Why Reactions Differ So Dramatically
One of the most useful insights from Stryker’s work is that people hold identities in hierarchies. Some identities are more “salient,” meaning they are more central to daily life and more likely to be enacted across situations. This helps explain why two faculty members can experience the same merger very differently.
For one person, their strongest identity may center on institutional prestige or disciplinary autonomy. A merger may feel like an existential threat to who they are professionally. For another, their most salient identity may be innovation-oriented or interdisciplinary. That person may see the merger as an exciting opportunity to build something new. The merger itself is not the whole story. The meaning attached to the merger depends on which identities are being activated.
Identity Theory also emphasizes commitment. The more emotionally and socially tied people are to a role or group, the more intensely they react when that identity is disrupted. Faculty who spent decades building a department may experience profound grief or anger because the merger threatens not just workflow, but a network of relationships, traditions, and accumulated meaning.
Meanwhile, newer faculty or administrators with fewer longstanding ties may adapt more quickly because the threatened identity is less central to their sense of self.
Mergers Create Identity Non-Verification
Identity theory suggests that distress occurs when people perceive that others no longer see them as they see themselves. This dynamic shows up constantly during mergers. A faculty member who previously felt respected as part of a highly specialized discipline may suddenly feel reduced to a budget line or organizational problem. A unit that once saw itself as academically distinct may now feel pressured to justify its existence within a broader structure.
Even language matters. When leaders emphasize “efficiency,” “streamlining,” or “reducing duplication,” faculty may hear something more like “your identity no longer carries the same value.” In my work with divorced fathers, those who had the most challenges to their salient “involved father” identities tended to feel more lost, mourning the loss of the type of father they believed they could no longer be.
That disconnect produces what identity theorists would call non-verification, and non-verification often generates strong emotional responses, including anger, anxiety, withdrawal, defensiveness, or cynicism.
Why Some People Become More Territorial
Identity theory also helps explain why mergers sometimes intensify conflict between groups that previously coexisted relatively peacefully. When identities feel threatened, people often strengthen their attachment to existing group boundaries. Departments may become more protective of curricula, space, faculty lines, traditions, or decision-making authority because these become symbolic markers of identity preservation.
The conflict is rarely just about resources. It is about maintaining continuity in how individuals and groups understand themselves. Ironically, the more uncertain the organizational environment becomes, the more tightly people may cling to old identities.
The Emotional Side of Organizational Change
Higher education often treats mergers as technical exercises to align policies, merge budgets, revise reporting structures, or even consolidate programs. Identity theory, however, reminds us that organizational structures are inhabited by human beings whose senses of self are embedded within those structures. That means successful mergers require more than administrative efficiency. They require identity work.
Leaders who navigate mergers effectively often do several things well: they acknowledge losses rather than dismissing them, they create opportunities for people to maintain valued identities, they help construct new shared identities, and they recognize that resistance is often rooted in disrupted meaning, not simple stubbornness.
People can adapt to organizational change. Identity theory does not suggest otherwise. But adaptation is easier when individuals can see continuity between who they were before the merger and who they are allowed to become afterward. Without that continuity, mergers can feel less like institutional evolution and more like identity erasure. And that is why reactions to higher education mergers are often so emotional, persistent, and deeply personal.